The Necromancers eBook

It was rather a business to read it. It involved
spectacles, a pushing aside of a plate, and a slight
turning to catch the light. Mrs. Baxter read
it, and handed it back, making three or four times
the sound written as “Tut.”

“The tiresome boy!” she said querulously,
but without alarm.

“What are we to do? You see, Mr. Morton
thinks we ought to do something. He mentions
a Mr. Cathcart.”

Mrs. Baxter reached out for the toast-rack.

“My dear, there’s nothing to be done.
You know what Laurie is. It’ll only make
him worse.”

Maggie looked at her uneasily.

“I wish we could do something,” she said.

“My dear, he’d have written to me—­Mr.
Morton, I mean—­if Laurie had been really
unwell. You see he only says he doesn’t
attend to his work as he ought.”

Maggie took up the letter, put it carefully back into
the envelope, and went on with breakfast. There
was nothing more to be said just then.

But she was uneasy, and after breakfast went out into
the garden, spud in hand, to think it all over, with
the letter in her pocket.

Certainly the letter was not alarming per se,
but per accidens—­that is to say,
taking into account who it was that had written, she
was not so sure. She had met Mr. Morton but once,
and had formed of him the kind of impression that
a girl would form of such a man in the hours of a
week-end—­a brusque, ordinary kind of barrister
without much imagination and a good deal of shrewd
force. It was surely rather an extreme step for
a man like this to write to a girl in such a condition
of things, asking her to use her influence to dissuade
Laurie from his present course of life. Plainly
the man meant what he said; he had not written to
Mrs. Baxter, as he explained in the letter, for fear
of alarming her unduly, and, as he expressly said,
there was nothing to be alarmed about. Yet he
had written.

Maggie stopped at the lower end of the orchard path,
took out the letter, and read the last three or four
sentences again:

Please forgive me if you think it was
unnecessary to write. Of course I have no
doubt whatever that the whole thing is nothing
but nonsense; but even nonsense can have a bad
effect, and Mr. Baxter seems to me to be far too much
wrapped up in it. I enclose the address of a friend
of mine in case you would care to write to him
on the subject. He was once a Spiritualist,
and is now a devout Catholic. He takes a
view of it that I do not take; but at any rate
his advice could do no harm. You can trust him
to be absolutely discreet.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
James Morton

It really was very odd and unconventional; and Mr.
Morton had not seemed at all an odd or unconventional
person. He mentioned, too, a particular date,
February 25, as the date by which the medium would
have returned, and some sort of further effort was
going to be made; but he did not attempt to explain
this, nor did Maggie understand it. It only seemed
to her rather sinister and unpleasant.